Posted by Mike Bijon February 02, 2006
Far better and less selfishly than I said it in End of Net Neutrality Points to Another Bubble - I Want QoS Before I Fund It, Jeff Chester reviews the effects of the telecom carriers commoditizing bandwidth usage and the effects on consumers in The End of the Internet?.
Chester’s article discusses both the changes in FCC policies that allow carriers to discriminate against the type, source, and destination of traffic and political moves to profile internet traffic and stop the construction of community wi-fi networks - without speculating to deeply on the effects such carrier-control will have. It is far more informative and less alarmist than many similar posts since Om Malik’s original note Slow Lingering Death of Net Neutrality?.
I’m beginning to think that the answer to many of these policy- and lobbyist-driven fights isn’t in fighting the regulation, but in performing an end-run past it. A few small carriers participating in an open exchange for bandwidth and network traffic (just like the oil market or the CBOT commodities market) would efficiently price bandwidth and keep networks open. It would likely be more expensive for corporations than their current long-term network contracts - but it would also keep prices below the premium levels the carriers want and encourage competition from smaller networks. I just wonder if the new “manage yourself” FCC would ever allow such an exchange.
Same-day Update:
Business Week has also picked up the story today, in Is Verizon a Network Hog?. It’s probably worth a read just because it’s a conservative, commerce-friendly publication that’s lightly taking the side of Google and Amazon (though they may have been the only companies involved who offered quotes) - although the article presents very little new information and no editorial on the situation.
Good Morning Silicon Valley has no mention of network neutrality or premium services, but We thought you said spend the $200 billion on “dark fiber” details that $200 billion in tax breaks were given to telecom carriers to upgrade consumer, last-mile connections. The “reference” sites for the $200 billion figure seem awfully spammy to me and the 1996 Telecom Reform, Wikipedia article lacks details, so I’m unclear on the actual terms of those tax breaks. I do know that I’m still lacking connectivity greater than 1.5 mbps (as is everyone not in a Fios fiber or 20 mbps cable beta area) and that, if true, this point could carry a lot of weight against the telecom carriers lobbying for stricter control of traffic on their networks.
Posted by Mike Bijon January 26, 2006
In response to The Problems With 2.0, pt 345314: I’ve noticed the “getting stupid” results myself after heavy following of Memeorandum. I think it’s largely due to the limited number of topics important enough to rank on their pages. There seems to be less of an effect when using digg, but I tend to stay off the front page there, as the topics that make it there commonly seem to be of little interest to me.
As for the technical aspects of why search and aggregation work best with less content and in smaller communities –
Recent research indicates that search has a reverse effect than is commonly assumed, because it encourages a higher volume of consumption:
in spite of the rich-get-richer dynamics implicitly contained in the use of link analysis to rank search hits, the net effect of search engines on traffic appears to produce an egalitarian effect, smearing out the traffic attraction of high-degree pages. Our empirical data clearly shows a sublinear scaling relation between referral traffic from search engines and page in-degree. This seems to be in agreement with the observation that search engines lead users to visiting about 20% more pages than surfing alone
I suspect that aggregators follow the same patterns and encourage even greater consumption than the input-required world of search terms. If you feel dumber it’s probably a result of the content itself and not the aggregator.
As for the mathematical aspects of aggregation and search, I agree with niblettes that the value of search and aggregators drops as the number of inputs (web pages) and community (user feedback) grows. Instead of following niblette’s suggested attractor model, I think the decreasing value of search and aggregation is due to the nonlinearity of content contributed a big community (like digg’s front page) which results in the creation of unstable bifurcations and the onset of chaos. Nonlinearity may work stylistically for Tarantino, but it’s hard to follow a newspaper if you can’t tell the difference between ads, classifieds, and articles (…also why anthropologists must devote so much time to what they do).
Posted by Mike Bijon January 20, 2006
While checking traffic for my drive home tonight I noticed a small dialog at the bottom of the Traffic.com website. It turns out Traffic.com is going public via OpenIPO and trying to raise between $69-82 million in the process. …isn’t Traffic.com built around largely free municipal traffic data? What’s all the cash for - the AJAX map interface?
Despite all the talk about whether Web 2.0 is turning in to “Bubble 2.0″ there is no way to confirm it unless bubble prices start hitting the markets. Om’s Babble not Bubble 2.0* points out that startup costs, VC investments, and market exits are all low, a good sign that there isn’t a bubble. Regardless, even if VCs and M&As heat up and start throwing money around it still won’t be a bubble until the “regular Joe’s” start throwing cash into the pot so the big players can cash out.
I’ll stop this speculation of my own - and just wait to see if Traffic.com, the next guy, or the next guy go big.
Posted by Mike Bijon January 14, 2006
Jason Kottke contrasts the “Slashdot effect” and the “Digg effect” in Digg vs. Slashdot (or, traffic vs. influence) and draws conclusions about the level of influence each site has over the webosphere (both sites are somewhat more mainstream than the blogosphere). I think that the exact traffic levels delivered by each site are relatively unimportant, after all both have very different readers with differrent habits (as a formerly active /. user, through 1999-2000 - I expect that a lot of Slashdot readers are visiting Kottke’s site and numerous pages on it so that they can “better” participate in the commentary in Slashdot’s post comments).
I suspect that both the Digg and Slashdot audiences are unlikely to have Alexa (formerly a spyware company) software or toolbar installed on their PCs, so the Alexa results for both sites are probably an order of magnitude closer to the traffic of “generic” sites like MSN and Yahoo than alexa shows them to be. Regardless, both Digg and Slashdot represent similar types of sites and both also offer a style of news and editorial that would be difficult to accomplish on the same scale in meatspace.
Truth be told - I think the real story is how many active users Digg, Slashdot have and how both sites handle those audiences. Most news sites that started in traditional media would be thrilled to have that many eyeballs just to flash banner ads to - while Digg and Slashdot have that many readers actively involved in their community and the concern is to keep delivering stories of value to their audience. There’s a lesson to be learned there, although very few websites will ever do more than just talk about it because it’s not just about making easy money on the web.
Also worth mentioning, several commenters on Kottke’s story think Slashdot might be able to bump its mainstream readership by changing its tone, article topics, and/or layout. The editors of Slashdot, however, are probably more likely to make fun of mainstream traffic than try to get their attention. Again, exactly why /. can cause the Slashdot effect and CNN.com is an also ran.
Mike Bijon: I work as senior technology manager and technologist for 
